Red Hat, Ubuntu are open source winners

Ubuntu and Red Hat are the most used Linux distributions among the 35,000 members of content-management vendor Alfresco's community, the company found in its second survey of trends in enterprise open-source software usage.

Chris Kanaracus, IDG News Service
February 11, 2008

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Ubuntu and Red Hat are the most used Linux distributions among the 35,000 members of content-management vendor Alfresco's community, the company found in its second survey of trends in enterprise open-source software usage.

The surveys help inform Alfresco's technology strategy, according to Ian Howells, Alfresco's chief marketing officer. "It's important for us to know which platforms to test against first," he said, adding, "It's in users' interest to give us good data."

Alfresco is UK based, but Howells said that adoption of enterprise open source in the UK lagged behind that of France and Germany. “UK government policy towards Microsoft has created an eco system where Microsoft is the default,” eh said.

Matt Aslett, enterprise software analyst at The 451 Group agreed. “Unfortunately the UK still appears to be behind other nations in considering the use of open source software. Although there are isolated examples of local governments taking a lead on exploring the benefits of open source - such as Birmingham and Bristol - central government has pursued a policy of theoretically considering open source alongside proprietary software, while entering into framework agreements with the likes of Microsoft and Oracle.”

Enterprise open source users also reported using a variety of proprietary enterprise software.

Among Windows users, Vista adoption was just 2%, compared to 63% for Windows XP and 28% for Windows Server 2003.

Microsoft's Office suite remained strong, however, with 66% usage. Twenty-four percent of the respondents reported they used OpenOffice. However, German and French users were twice as likely to use the latter compared to those in the U.S. or U.K., Alfresco said.

Tomcat held a dominant position in the application server category, logging 72%. JBoss' entry stood at 18%. Entries from Sun, BEA and IBM rounded out the field.

In the virtualization category, VMware perhaps predictably ranked highest, at 61%. Microsoft's Virtual Server took 16%, followed by Xen, Parallels, Virtual Iron and "other" offerings, according to the study.

MySQL took home the database prize, with a 60% tally, followed by Oracle with 14% and Microsoft SQL Server with 13%.

"People want to have a mixed stack," Howells said “and open source enterprise software providers need to understand that.”

Alfresco collected data between July and December of last year, with survey participants coming from 260 countries, according to the company. Fifty percent were from Europe, the Middle East and Asia, while 24% were in the U.S., and 26% from other nations, Alfresco said.